Brennan's James Hamilton, left, tackles Cedar Park's Lane Waller during the first half of a 4A high school football playoff game, Friday, Dec. 7, 2012, at the Alamodome in San Antonio.

Brennan's James Hamilton, left, tackles Cedar Park's Lane Waller during the first half of a 4A high school football playoff game, Friday, Dec. 7, 2012, at the Alamodome in San Antonio.

Photo: Darren Abate, For The Express-News

Poet laureate fighting cancer her own way

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Carmen Tafolla's calendar doesn't look like a cancer patient's. It's filled with lectures and readings reflective of the San Antonio poet laureate's busy literary and civic life.

The only overt sign she might be fighting breast cancer is the short bob betraying her preference for long hair — her own, wavy and auburn.

Tafolla, 61, wears a wig to meet societal norms. It's an easier concession for her than buying into mainstream medicine's approach to cancer treatment.

Still, she is halfway through six months of chemotherapy. Every three weeks, she prays it kills the cancer before it kills her. The tumor has shrunk by more than half.

Doctors have advised that she undergo surgery, a second round of chemo and radiation, too.

Tafolla has a doctorate in bilingual education and has read a lot of cancer research. She said her philosophy has been to “do the minimal” invasive care. So she will have surgery but nothing more, concerned that radiation and more chemo will increase the chances of a recurrence.

In January, Tafolla wrote a piece for the San Antonio Express-News in which she cautioned “mi querido pueblo,” her dear city, “that cancer is easier to avoid than it is to heal.”

Last summer, as she pondered her treatment choices, she wrote a poem that hinted at her health. “Lasso the chaos of your collapsing life like a lost steer, Wrangle it with this well-worn rope, made to survive the torrid heat.”

Tafolla's next book of poems is about San Antonio.

Late this month, she'll read in “Tex-Mex” at an international conference on inter-language at the Université Michel de Montaigne in France.

For six months after being diagnosed with a malignant tumor last June, Tafolla followed no conventional treatment for her Stage I cancer. She started a host of alternative therapies.

First and foremost, she left behind “the American diet,” cutting sugars, preservatives, processed foods and hydrogenated oils. She can speak with some authority about specific fresh vegetables and fruits that can help fight cancer. She eats organic meats, too.

“Our modern diet,” she wrote in January, “is basically a cancer-producing diet.”

Dietary and nutritional changes have boosted her immune system, she said, and lowered her blood pressure enough to get off medication for it.

Tafolla has taken various supplements, one of which she said increases production of white blood cells that fight cancer. A Romanian scientist's formula for it is under patent review in Germany, she said.

She has practiced Qigong, a meditation therapy, and pranic (or no-touch energy) healing. She has received intravenous, ultraviolet ozone therapy and high doses of Vitamin C, also intravenously, she said.

Tafolla has had cavitations (infections in her jawbone) repaired, a procedure outside mainstream dentistry.

She also has done a lot of “cleansing” that includes prayer and letting go of anger and resentment. “I didn't have a lot,” she said. “But what I had, I got rid of.”

At the same time, Karnad warned some alternative therapies can come with risks, noting the use of Vitamin A for the treatment of lung cancer. “There were problems. It was not effective, and there were potential risks.”

Friends, acquaintances and public figures fighting cancer motivated Tafolla to speak out about conventional care.

“This is epidemic,” she said. “This is not acceptable to a well-educated, well-funded nation” to have such high rates of cancer.

In addition to her combination of therapies, she's motivated by her mother, Mary D. Tafolla, who survived two bouts of colon cancer, the first when the poet was 3.

The 95-year-old's mind remains sharp, her body healthy. In the 1950s and '60s, mainstream medicine said she'd die.

Tafolla paused a moment, blue eyes in steely gaze, and said, “She buried all the doctors.”